May 2 News: Last 12 Years Were Among 13 Warmest On Record, World Meteorological Organisation Confirms

2012 was the ninth-warmest year since 1850, and 2001-2012 were all among the top 13 warmest years on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization. [Climate News Network]

Last year was among the ten warmest years since records began more than 160 years ago, the World Meteorological Organisation says.

The WMO says 2012 was the ninth warmest year recorded since 1850, and the 27th consecutive year in which the global land and ocean temperatures were above the 1961-1990 average.

The WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said the continuing warming was cause for worry, and that it was on track to continue.

The assessment comes in the WMO’s Statement on the status of the global climate in 2012, the latest in an annual series providing information about temperatures, precipitation, extreme events, tropical cyclones, and sea ice extent.

It estimates the 2012 global land and ocean surface temperature during January-December 2012 at 0.45°C (±0.11°C) above the 1961-1990 average of 14.0°C. The years 2001-2012 were all among the top 13 warmest years on record.

Fracking a natural gas well requires up to five million gallons of water at once, and with thousands of wells across the American West, the region’s water supply is threatened by expanded shale gas extraction. [New York Times]

John Abraham and Dana Nuccitelli push back on Roy Spencer’s contention that fossil fuels are not expensive, pointing out subsidies and external costs. [Guardian]

Coming on the heels of the first enhanced geothermal plant in the U.S., Australia generated power at its first, appropriately-titled, EGS Habanero plant. [Renew Economy]

HP’s new servers will allow data centers to use 89 percent less energy, take up less space, and cost less. [CleanTechnica]

Old electric car batteries don’t have to be recycled as soon as they leave the car — researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are testing out old Chevy Volt batteries that might not be good for the road, but could be used as energy storage for the electric grid. [EarthTechling]

GROVER, a robot designed by NASA to roam Greenland and take readings of its ice sheet, will be tested on Friday. [Climate Central]

Yes it is. I live in Michigan it’s like a nice warm early summer day. Buried in snow a few states over, and fire and wind in California. We are changing the arctic and thus the Jet stream. This is what we get.

I attended a meeting today in which many well informed people sat and talked and listened about water supplies and climate change. During the conference I was reminded of how mired in the details and plans and discussion we have become, how drug down in the Gordian knot, how slow to act, and yet everyone pays attention to the details and not the big picture. The bird protectors still want no windfarms; the rooftop solar installers don’t want large solar PV facilities; and transmission lines are just a fantasy, never mind the transportation component of GHG emissions.

The toxification of the biosphere by man-made poisons is one of the litany of ecological disasters that is bringing us undone. And, as with the others, because capitalism decrees that profit is more important than anything else in the omniverse, the disasters keep on coming, business denies the effects, their political stooges stymie action, and new and more deadly filth is produced and utilised every year. When we undermine the web of life at its bases, we ensure our own inevitable destruction.

nior US government officials are to be briefed at the White House this week on the danger of an ice-free Arctic in the summer within two years.

The meeting is bringing together Nasa’s acting chief scientist, Gale Allen, the director of the US National Science Foundation, Cora Marett, as well as representatives from the US Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.

This is the latest indication that US officials are increasingly concerned about the international and domestic security implications of climate change.

Senior scientists advising the US government at the meeting include 10 Arctic specialists, including marine scientist Prof Carlos Duarte, director of the Oceans Institute at the University of Western Australia.

In early April, Duarte warned that the Arctic summer sea ice was melting at a rate faster than predicted by conventional climate models, and could be ice free as early as 2015 – rather than toward the end of the century, as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected in 2007. He said:

“The Arctic situation is snowballing: dangerous changes in the Arctic derived from accumulated anthropogenic green house gases lead to more activities conducive to further greenhouse gas emissions. This situation has the momentum of a runaway train.”